Sci-fi, Psychic Powers, and Setting Design

[Arith Winterfell]

Yes, those are good observations about my current ideas.

I had a general idea that while jumps by warping space work, but don't really allow for FTL communications other than courier ship. I figured this would limit spread of homogenizing culture, but also makes carrying media and culture between worlds means the arrival of ships with news about other worlds and their cultures would be cultural novelties. Basically starting the latest trends and such.

I figure then that star travel would consisted of jumps, followed by resting periods out in interstellar space, rebuilding energy for the next jump. With each jump going a limited distance.

Another idea for the setting I've had is the nature of first wave colonists. That humans set out from earth in large colony founding ships moving at sub-light speeds taking centuries to get to their destinations, settling, then diverging from baseline humanity via genetic engineering. Hence "alien" civilizations. All the truly alien civilizations that pre-date humanity left mysterious ruins, but no living species (at least not yet found). But the divergence of the first wave colonists makes for interesting aliens.

For example, the Drayloth were originally humans in the first wave colonists who upon arriving at the new world they would settle set about transforming their colony ship into a space station, while limiting colonists settling on the world. This was because they wanted to avoid ecological damage to the world's native life. They also combined their DNA with that of certain native life to allow them to eat locale plant-like species and animal-like species rather than introducing invasive species and do ecological damage to force their introduction to the native ecosystems.

This, of course changed the settlers in various ways making them a lot closer to the native life. Then disaster struck and the colony ship in orbit was destroyed killing most aboard. So the survivors on the planet had to make do with what they had, falling back into earlier TL, and eventually coming to believe they were native species themselves.

This eventually over centuries developed a culture that by now is deeply divided between Rationalist Enlightenment factions vs. Conservative Religious nature religion that believes they are expressions of their world's spirit.

Then contact is made with the arrival of "Terran Humans" from Earth exacerbating the divide with Rationalists welcoming fellow intelligent life, while religious conservative groups rejecting "humans" as demons from the outer dark.

So that gives you an idea I've had for one world. Others would be different.